Thanks for your corrections to what I wrote. When reading your post, I realized that since I have not played in those ages, I am writing beyond my experiential knowledge and assumed CR's advice to be sound. I edited the post you replied to and struck out the places you have experience and I don't.
Could you say more about why ME is a bad age to camp in? I've been working under the impression that it's better than PME through TE, but you seem to disagree.
While it has a smaller footprint for production quests, production quests aren't a very good quest engine to begin with from PE onwards. You will get more quests from collection of raw coins and supplies and unbirthday. You may also consider military quests. As such while it's possible to have 100+ hatters in a barebones city devoid of interesting GBs for 20 quests a day, this isn't that great. Hatters are also pretty bad in terms of supplies/square/cost of collection or unbirthday. And the ratio of random reward supplies / cost of collection or unbirthday is lower in ME than the 3 ages that follow it so chateau fueled bonus quests are more strained.
The PME Junkyard is a goldmine in terms of raw supplies - for having a small drawback in happiness it has production per tile that won't be outdated until TE amongst non-premiums.
Unbirthday/Collect costs relative to reward ratio improve every age after ME until you hit TE.
Summary for questing high ages:
Starting in PE you should abandon for the most part 24 hr productions being the core of your quest engine - You should be using chateau-fueled unbirthdays, collect coins, collect supplies, and spend FP as most of your daily quests. Consider premium or event supply buildings as your supply providers when they're more efficient.
PME has the best nonpremium supply building for its age (Junkyard) in terms of supplies/space.
TE has the best unbirthday amongst high ages. After you leave it you should be prepared for another transition.
AF once you make the end of the tech tree for the age has an easily infinitely sustainable quest (build 8 decos of current age using the crystal flower deco near the end of AF). It also has double spend-FP quests making it the best high age to increase quest completions by arc cycling. And earlier in the age you can use the 'gain X happiness' quests to complete 2 quests every 5 to 10 minutes or so if you have the patience and space by building an appropriate amount of bronze age cultural buildings and selling them off (use the tavern 75% construction boost).
OF allows you to use 6 blacksmiths on 24 hr production to complete a quest - there's 3 copies of this quest so if you manage to get a break from story this can turn into 2 blacksmiths per quest if you want a return to the glory days of 24 hr productions making lots of quests. 3 blacksmiths per quest is a given.
VF allows you to run 6 1 hr productions for a quest or continue with 6 blacksmiths for a quest (but only 1 per 6 blacksmiths).